[bright music]
- Announcer: The following program is a PBS Wisconsin
original production.
- Angela Fitzgerald: For many, the idea of Black communities
in the Midwest is traced to the Great Migration.
However, the Black population was here
well before then, just in smaller numbers.
How did these communities get started,
and how did they pave the way for the people that came after?
Let's find out why race matters
regarding the history of Black Midwesterners.
[upbeat music]
While we often think of the South
as the heart of Black history in America,
the Midwest has its own powerful story to tell.
By 1850, Wisconsin's Black population was small
but growing, with about 635 Black residents statewide,
despite systemic racism and discriminatory laws.
During the Great Migration in the early 20th century,
Wisconsin saw a significant increase in its Black population
as families moved north to escape violence in the South
and find industrial jobs.
Milwaukee, for example, saw its Black population grow
from fewer than a thousand people in 1910
to over 21,000 by 1950.
In this episode of Why Race Matters,
we're sitting down with Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara
from UW-Madison's Department of African American Studies.
We'll dive into the forgotten history of Black Midwesterners
and discuss how Black identity in the Midwest
has been shaped by resilience, resistance,
and the ongoing search for community.
How are you doing tonight, Dr. Clark-Pujara?
- Christy Clark-Pujara: I'm doing pretty good, and yourself?
- I'm doing great, and I appreciate you
taking the time out to join us on Why Race Matters
to talk about your work,
so I'm seriously looking forward to this free history lesson...
[Angela laughing] - Well, thanks for having me.
- ...that you're going to offer us.
So can you tell us a little bit about your work
in terms of being a Black historian
that has focused some of your work on the Midwest,
but also how you got into that area of study?
- Yeah, so I am a unlikely academic and historian.
If you had told me in high school
this is what I've been doing,
I would have laughed in your face.
You know, I wanted to go into, I actually started off pre-med,
took some classes in college from history professors,
and got really intrigued because suddenly it wasn't
about memorizing names and dates.
It was about why our world looked the way it did,
and I found that really intriguing,
and, long story short, I was taking history classes
out of pure interest, and my advisor asked me,
"Why are you taking all these history classes?"
I said, "'Cause I'm liking them."
He said, "Do you ever think about doing what you like?"
I had not.
I was a first-generation college student,
and, you know, I was a good student,
and so it was, you know, go into business, law,
or become a medical doctor.
I didn't know what a historian did.
- Right.
- What you could do with a history major.
It didn't make sense to me.
My advisor told me to go talk to my history professors,
and so I did that, and I found out,
oh, these people, like, they write books.
They do primary research.
They're the citation,
and I found that really intriguing and decided
to go to graduate school instead of medical school.
- Hmm. - I'm from Omaha, Nebraska.
My mother's family was there before it became a state.
I went to college at the University of St. Thomas
in St. Paul, Minnesota.
I went to graduate school
at the University of Iowa in Iowa City,
and I have lived here since 2009,
so I am a Midwest Midwesterner.
- Mm-hmm.
Thank you for that retelling of your journey
to how you got to this place of not only having
the lived experience of a Black person in the Midwest,
but also having the scholastic expertise
to be able to then give people a retelling of, okay,
historically, what has transpired that has brought us
to the present-day condition around Blackness
within not just our state, but our region.
- Mm-hmm.
- So can you tell us a little bit more
about the historical component there?
Because I think at a surface level,
those of us who have no background in history are like,
"Oh, yeah, the Great Migration."
A lot of us came up from the South,
settled in places like Chicago, Milwaukee,
and that's how Black people came to a state like Wisconsin,
but is that the full story,
as well as, I know I glossed over the Great Migration,
so anything you want to add to really help those
who may not have any idea of what we're talking about,
what that means as well?
- The history of people of African descent...
- Mm-hmm.
- ...of Black people in the Midwest,
that goes back to about 1725.
That's one of the first historical records you have
of people of African descent being in the place
that becomes Wisconsin,
and they were here with the French colonists.
A lot of Wisconsinites
seem to either be pretty light on their history
or kind of forget the history of French colonization,
which is funny because, you know, we have places
like Prairie du Chien and Eau Claire, Wisconsin, right?
Like, those are holdovers of French colonization,
and so you have a history that in the region
goes back to the 15th century,
and in what becomes the state, goes back to the 18th century.
- Mm.
- So sometimes, when I tell people that I'm studying
Black people in early Wisconsin, they'll just look at me
because they assume that they weren't there, and they were.
- Mm, and so earlier than what we assumed...
- Yes. - ...there was a Black presence.
- Yes.
- And how did that change over time, and what did that,
what were those experiences like of those who were here earlier
than when those,
the rest may have come during the Great Migration?
- It was very varied, right,
because the Midwest, as it was coming into being,
and the Midwest gets that name
because of the Northwest Ordinance,
which most people learned about in school, right,
that at the dawn of the American Revolution,
you know, you have the Northwest Ordinance
that then becomes the Midwest, right,
and then that expands later.
But the Northwest Ordinance states--
and it's been a minute since I've quizzed myself on this--
are Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin,
and Minnesota, right,
are carved out of the Northwest Territories.
And the Northwest Territories were part of the concessions
that the British give the Americans
at the end of the American Revolution,
so America is born an empire, right,
has territories
at the same time it becomes a republic, right,
and so those five states are carved out of those territories,
but those territories already had a history of colonization.
- Mm-hmm.
- And that history of colonization was Spanish
and then French and then British and then American, right,
and so you're talking about
successive colonial experiences.
- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
- So if we just think about Wisconsin
in the 1720s, you have people that are,
you have Black people that are both free and enslaved,
and enslaved people are usually with the French fur traders
or military people, right?
So you might be accompanying a captain,
and you might be in charge of reloading his rifle,
or you might be with a fur trapper,
and that's what you were doing.
You were catching beavers, right?
You are running down foxes,
and then you are stretching those animal skins
that are then being transported back to the East Coast
that then go across the Atlantic and are sold, right,
and so it's really varied.
You may be building a fort, the very first fort in a place,
right, because that's a colonial exercise.
That's how you claim a space
and try to get control over that space,
so you might literally be building
the first roads and homes and buildings,
and so there wasn't "a" experience.
- Mm-hmm.
- There was a variety of experiences.
So often when people think about American slavery,
they just immediately go to, like, cotton.
- Right. - Or tobacco,
but what made enslaved people so incredibly valuable
was the fact that they were people.
- Mm-hmm. - So they could be a translator.
They could be a master carpenter.
- Mm-hmm. - They could be a fur trapper.
They could mine lead. - Mm-hmm.
- They could build roads.
They could keep notes, all kinds of things,
and so you have a really varied experience.
What makes the Midwest unique
is that the experience of enslavement was...
sparse. - Mm-hmm.
- And really varied.
You don't have plantation slavery.
- Got it.
- Right, which is what people often think about
when they think about American slavery.
That was one type,
but that wasn't the only kind, right,
and so you have people who were doing agricultural work
in the Midwest,
but you have people who never did any agricultural work.
- So for the examples that you gave of individuals
who might be, you said,
supporting a captain and loading a rifle
or fur trade involvement professionals,
were those folks enslaved in doing that work?
Were they free?
Like, what was their status and proximity to slavery as,
in the way that we understand it?
- During the French period,
we would understand them as chattel.
The French had something called the Code Noir,
so they had a very centralized colonial government
where there was the law
and procedures of what enslavement
was supposed to look like.
Now, whether that was actually happening in the hinterlands...
- Is a different thing. - ...was one thing,
but there was a code. - Okay.
When the British come in, it gets diffuse
because the British is a lot,
the British system was more decentralized,
and when the American comes in, it gets even more diffuse,
and it gets super confusing. - Right.
- Because the Americans
in the Northwest Ordinance say that slavery is prohibited
in the Northwest Territories. - But--
- So that's what the law says. - Right.
- Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance
says that slavery is prohibited in the Northwest Territories,
but there is law, and then there is the practice.
- Mm-hmm.
- When we think about our first territorial governor,
Henry Dodge, where's he from?
He's from Missouri.
He's born into a slaveholding family.
Who does he bring with him?
Toby, Tom, Lear, Jim, and Joe,
who he illegally holds in bondage
for nearly a dozen years,
has them mining lead year-round.
- Mm. - And then you have to think
about the military forts because, again,
this is how you exert your power as a colonial force.
So if you want to map out areas of slavery in the Midwest,
just look for the first forts, right,
and in Wisconsin, you think of places like Prairie du Chien,
where Fort Crawford was, right?
It had previously been a place
where the French military fort was,
becomes an American fort, and military officers
were actually given an allowance to hire or buy slaves.
They could have servants, or they could have slaves.
- Even though slavery was illegal?
- Yes, but military officers,
one of the perks of being a military officer
was an allowance to pay you back for the use of your own slave--
enslaved person, excuse me.
I'm trying to make sure my language stays on point.
We say "enslaved people" to recognize their humanity.
Nobody is a slave.
Somebody, people are made to, their labor is stolen,
so we refer to them as enslaved people.
So I'm gonna turn it on you just a little bit.
Who was the President of the Confederacy?
Do you remember? - Ooh, I don't.
- Jefferson Davis, right?
Where's Jefferson Davis's first military posting
before he becomes Jefferson Davis,
President of the Confederacy, as an officer?
- In the South, I'm assuming.
- In Prairie du Chien. - In Wisconsin.
- Where he brings enslaved people with him,
and he is reimbursed for their use.
- So the practice of slavery was clearly a thing,
even though legally, like you're saying, it wasn't,
and so is that where some of the thinking
around the idea of slavery
not existing in the area comes from?
- Yeah, so there's this idea that slavery
doesn't exist in the Midwest.
Now, I don't want people to get the wrong impression.
Slavery was sparse and irregular.
- Okay.
- Especially in the American Midwest.
It is sparse, and it was irregular,
but it persisted well into the 1840s,
and it's because of the cultural comfort with slavery.
Who is coming to these places? - Right.
- People who grew up
in the slaveholding American republic.
America is born a slaveholding republic.
Most of the presidents are slaveholders.
This isn't something notorious or strange to anyone.
- Right, it's not as though when people move, they're like,
"Okay, we're done with that.
We're going to not do the thing that we've been steeped in..."
- "Let's do it," right?
- "...up until this point of my life."
- Absolutely, so the practice of slavery
in the Midwest in the American colonial period
rests on community consent, not legal consent.
- Mm.
- But cultural and community consent.
- Wow, so, like you're saying,
there's those loopholes
where our military bases will allow certain things,
but if you are still engaging in certain practices
outside of the loopholes, then you can be challenged
if people know to challenge and--
- Or they want to challenge you,
because when does Henry Dodge, our first territorial governor,
finally "emancipate" these people
who weren't supposed to be held in bondage in the first place?
When it becomes a political liability
because statehood is becoming imminent
and those votes are coming up,
so, "Okay, now I need to do this,"
and he actually writes emancipation papers.
You can go to UW-Platteville, to the Wisconsin Room,
ask for the papers of Henry Dodge,
and see a manumission document that was brought to the county
as if it were normal practice, right, in which he says
that he had promised to free them at a convenient time.
Well, they never were supposed to be held in bondage.
You weren't at a fort.
You held them with community consent.
You're emancipating people
who weren't supposed to be held in bondage in the first place,
but your community allowed it.
Your neighbors allowed it.
- It's safe to assume there was no pushback
or no response to him carrying out this practice
that could be seen as, like, "noble"
and the right thing to do, even though
he shouldn't have been doing it in the first place.
- Well, there were people who were critical of it,
but he continued to do it.
They made him very rich, right?
He was mining lead year-round with these five people, right,
and that's what allows him to buy plots of land
and become a prospector and have a successful mine
and become Henry Dodge,
and now my students just know Henry Dodge
as the, you know, hardy founding father
who the state park is named after,
that the pavilion is named after,
that the library is named after,
and they've never heard of Toby, Tom, Lear, Jim, and Joe.
- Mm.
Wow, and so up until this point,
you've been telling us about the history
of Black people in the State of Wisconsin
and where the topic of slavery presented itself
within the law, within practice,
but we haven't yet gotten to the point
of these urban centers.
We're now, thinking of present-day Wisconsin,
where we are more likely to be living,
and so how do we get from the place
of, where you've introduced us to now we have
these urban centers that are considered
more of the predominantly, not even predominantly,
but where Black people are more likely to live
within the State of Wisconsin?
- Yeah, so before the Civil War,
some 63,000 Black people, both free and freedom-seeking--
and when I say "freedom-seeking,"
I mean they stole themselves. - Mm-hmm.
- And felt very satisfied in that, right.
They had taken, stole themselves from bondage, right?
You have some 63,000 free and freedom-seeking Black people
in what becomes the Northwest Territory states.
- Mm-hmm.
- And that number is actually really significant
because in order to become a state in that period,
you had to have 60,000 non-Indigenous people.
- Wow. - So that means there was more
than a state's worth of Black people
coming to the Midwest before the Civil War,
and the reason why they were coming was a reason
why a lot of white Americans and Western European immigrants
and then Eastern European immigrants were coming,
for opportunity,
in particular the opportunity to own land,
because the Northwest Ordinance did not have
a racial qualifier for land ownership.
The Black population was rural. - Mm.
- It becomes urban.
It becomes urban after the Civil War
and during the Great Migration.
The Great Migration is after the Civil War,
coming into the 20th century, when you have
over a billion Black people migrating out of the South
into, primarily, cities in the North.
- Mm-hmm.
- And so when we're thinking about race,
it's because race shaped the Midwest.
- Mm-hmm.
- The Midwest is overwhelmingly white
on purpose, right?
There were policies and laws
that encouraged the migration of white people to the Midwest
and discouraged the migration of Black people to the Midwest,
and all you have to do is look at territorial laws
and statutes to see that.
To become an incorporated town during the territorial period
in Wisconsin, the only people who got counted
were white men. - Mm.
- Right, and so you have a situation
in which whiteness is cultivated in the Midwest
very intentionally.
- And does that relate to you mentioning
that the original Black people that were in the state
were more likely to be present in rural spaces?
Were those territorial laws also influential
in terms of how we've seen that shift over time,
in terms of our ability to own land
and maintain our presence in those rural settings?
- Yeah, because you see Black rural land ownership
in places like Pleasant Ridge, Town of Forest,
and some of that loss of land happened organically.
Kids didn't wanna stay.
They went to World War I, were like,
"I'm not going to go back to that small town."
- Mm-hmm.
- But it also becomes an increasingly hostile space
for Black people to be, right?
And after the Civil War, you also get the rise
of sundown towns, where it becomes a safety thing,
and you see the Black population leaving rural areas
all over the Midwest and concentrating in cities.
- Which is interesting because those cities then
also get the recognition or, unfairly, right,
of being unsafe when, it's in your description,
they attracted the communities they did
because of the feeling of safety that wasn't present
in those non-urban settings.
So that's just, to me, like, counterintuitive,
like you're calling these cities dangerous
but because of who lives there
and the numbers in which they live there,
but how do these people come to be here?
Because that's where they felt safe.
- And those cities get designated as dangerous
in the post-industrial age when the jobs dry up.
- Mm-hmm.
- And any area where there is
a lack of economic hope becomes dangerous.
I don't care who's there. - That's an excellent point.
- Right? - Right, so they have to do
what they have to do, then, to sustain themselves.
- Right, and so, you know,
they start getting those reputations as dangerous
in that post-industrial economic decline
where manufacturing, middle-class,
stable jobs disappear,
but not looking at that really kind of longer picture.
- Mm-hmm.
- And the Black population in the Midwest,
especially before the Civil War, was really small, right?
They were very small numbers.
When I'm talking about Black people in Wisconsin,
you know, in the 1830s, I'm talking about hundreds
and then in the 1840s, thousands.
- Yeah.
- But what's really curious about that is,
you would have thought there were a whole lot more of them.
When you read the territorial debates and how much time
was spent discussing whether or not Black men
would have access to the ballot box,
you would have thought that they were, you know,
creating some kind of political bloc.
Like, if all the Black people had voted three times,
they still wouldn't have created a political bloc.
The discussion was about who was a worthy citizen
and who was welcome in that place
and who was not because the Midwest, I think,
then and now is oppressive and progressive at the same time.
It's not either/or.
It's "and," so in the 1840s,
a freedom-seeking Black person could expect to find help
on the Underground Railroad in Wisconsin.
- Mm-hmm.
- But a free Black man that traced their ancestry
back to the colonial period couldn't vote.
- And what you're describing also seems to reflect
the tone that I've heard from others
when comparing the experience of racism in the Midwest
compared to the South, for example,
where it might be more explicit, in your face,
and here it's described as more passive-aggressive
because what you just told us about...
- This is absolutely passive-aggressive...
- ...is passive-aggressive.
- ...racism. - Mm-hmm.
- And this is just my personal...
- Yeah.
- ...experience and point of view.
- Mm-hmm.
- I much prefer the in-your-face racism
that often happens in places like the South
because you know where you stand.
- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. - It is exhausting
dealing with passive-aggressive racism.
It's a minefield.
It is emotionally and mentally exhausting,
and I say that as a Midwesterner.
- Right, like, this is home for you.
This is what you've known your entire life.
- Yeah.
I'd just rather someone tell me to my face.
- Right.
- "I don't like you, I don't want you here."
- Right.
- Versus the experiences I've had,
and they go back to childhood. - Mm-hmm.
- I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood,
and so most of my friends were white,
and they told me what their parents said.
- Mm.
- But that's not what happened when you saw
my parents at the park or the grocery store.
- Right.
- Right, and so I grew up with that duality,
that understanding that that smiling,
"How is the weather?" Midwest nice in your face...
- Mm-hmm. - ...wasn't genuine.
Sometimes, I'll have someone say something to me like,
"Why are you always talking about race?
Why are you always talking about white and Black?"
Because the founders of my country
and the founders of the state that I live in
were obsessed with it. - Right.
- And that's not my opinion.
Just read the suffrage article
in the 1848 Wisconsin Constitution.
- Right.
- What does it say the first condition is
after you do the age, maleness, then what becomes next?
White. - Right.
- And you didn't even need to be a citizen.
You just needed to be white, right?
If you were a white person who was not yet a citizen
of the United States, all you had to do to vote
in the State of Wisconsin after 1848
is declare an intention, to publicly declare an intention
to become a citizen of the state,
have lived here for the designated amount of time,
I think it was six months or a year,
be 21 years or older, and male. - Mm-hmm.
- Right, and so they made it about race,
and we are being disingenuous in talking about
what our society looks like now
when we try to act like that wasn't a thing, right?
- Absolutely. - This is not my language.
This is not my lexicon.
This is the language of colonizers.
They were talking about whiteness and Blackness.
They were debating Black male suffrage and coming up
with all of the reasons why Black men
who trace their heritage back to the colonial period
couldn't vote but others could.
- Right.
- And so I'm just being true to the history,
and I think it's really important for people
to really understand that and look at these primary documents
and not just assume that it's myself,
you know, inserting this.
I'm talking about what was there,
and they were obsessed with race, not me.
- Right.
"I'm just," you said, "honoring the language
"and the context that was created
that we all have to navigate within."
So initially, you mentioned when you speak to your students,
talk to your classes about why history matters.
So for the time period we've been in conversation,
we've been laying the foundation
for the history of Black people in the Midwest.
For some who are like, "I'm not really in a history like that,"
why does that matter today in terms of our understanding
of the Black experience in the Midwest and in Wisconsin,
and what it can tell us about our future?
- It tells us why our neighborhoods
look the way they do.
What is the wealthiest neighborhood in Madison?
Nakoma.
- Mm.
- And Nakoma was a restricted neighborhood.
"Jews and people of Ethiopian race,"
that is a direct quote,
were not allowed to buy plots there.
- Mm.
- And then people inherit homes.
- That's very specific, too.
- And home ownership is how Americans build wealth.
- Mm-hmm.
- If you wanted to understand wealth gaps
among African Americans and white Americans,
you need to understand history.
If you want to understand why Milwaukee
looks the way it does, you need to understand
redlining and housing discrimination.
This doesn't just come out of nowhere.
- Right. - History explains our present.
It tells us why our cities look and function the way they do,
who's had access to opportunity and who has not.
- And what would you say has been
the contributions culturally, socially, economically
of having a Black presence in our state?
- Black people's insistence on having
an opportunity here, of fighting for their rights
as full American citizens here.
The Wisconsin Historical Society
has digitized its petition records.
Petitions are absolutely fabulous because petitions
are how you get the voices of people
who could not participate in the formal politics, right?
Everyone had the right to petition.
Women had the right to petition.
Native Americans had the right to petition.
African Americans, Asian Americans
had the right to petition, and they tell you
what they're fighting for in those communities, right,
and so if you want to understand where that love of justice...
- Mm-hmm.
- ...of liberty comes from,
it's from those communities, right,
and the Midwest is where America was figuring out who it was.
That's why there's so much myth around it
and romanticization of the Midwest,
and, you know, those kind of, like, hokey commercials
that talk about the Midwest that if you're from the Midwest,
you kind of cringe.
Like, you know, there's cities in the Midwest.
Yes, there's farms in the Midwest,
and there's, you know, small towns in the Midwest.
All of that is being sussed out in this period,
and Black people refuse to simply be acted upon.
- Mm-hmm.
- They refused to have their humanity
stripped from them.
They refused to have their claims of citizenship
taken from them.
They contested.
They made it arguable, right,
and so if you want to understand where this kind of grassroots,
"Everybody has a right to be heard."
- That comes from Black people. - Right?
That comes from people who were pushed to the margins,
and sometimes that was Western European immigrants,
and sometimes it was women,
and sometimes it was Asian Americans,
and sometimes it was African Americans.
If you don't study the people who were pushed to the margins,
you don't understand the places that you're in.
- Mm-hmm.
- Because they weren't simply acted upon.
- Right. - They demanded a space.
- So it sounds like we would all benefit
from maybe not fully becoming historians,
but at least learning more about the history
that isn't always taught to us.
- Absolutely, and I always tell my students,
if you pick up a history book and a good chunk of it
isn't footnotes, be suspect because a good historian
is gonna tell you why they think what they think, right?
I'm gonna make an argument about community consent
overriding the prohibition of slavery in Article 6.
Well, I should be able to tell you
what document I looked at and what archive
you can find it in, the folder name, right?
That it is a discipline that rests upon evidence, right,
and good historians are gonna tell you why they think
what they think and tell you where you can find that.
- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, oh, that's an excellent point,
and we would all benefit from, like you're saying,
doing our homework a little bit and reading up on our history.
- Absolutely.
- So we can understand our present
and also help contribute towards our future.
Thank you so much, Dr. Clark-Pujara.
- You're very welcome.
- The experiences of Black people in the Midwest
before the Great Migration reveal a history of resilience
and determination in the face of systemic barriers.
Their contributions to the region's culture,
economy, and social fabric
laid a foundation for future generations.
Understanding their legacy helps us honor their struggles
and achievements while working toward a more equitable future.
Watch additional episodes and content
at WhyRaceMatters.org.
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